AUTONOMOUS SPACES: Though funded by the state, filmmakers in Syria continue to find ways to make their often critical voices heard

by Cécile Boëx

Neglected-ignored even-Syrian cinema merits special attention for its originality, quality, and boldness. That said, compared to the high volume of film production in Egypt, the film industry's output is minuscule: since 1928, when the first Syrian film was made, the country has produced only about 150 features. Syrian cinema began to hit its stride in the Sixties with the success of a series of Egyptian-style light comedies mixing burlesque, romanticism, and song-and-dance. And while the Seventies marked the golden age of Syrian commercial filmmaking, a different mode of production began to emerge when the state became involved in 1964 with the establishment of the National Film Organization. The NFO opened up a new path for filmmakers by promoting the production of films free from the demands of profitability. Its objective was to produce "serious" work that reflected the political and social progress of the Arab world and, implicitly, transmitted and promoted the discourse of state power and the Ba'ath Party. The documentaries of the Seventies strikingly illustrate the mise-en-scène of the Ba'ath Party's progressive ideology by aestheticizing and sublimating the great modernizing projects of this period (the construction of the Euphrates dam, the industrialization of different sectors of the economy, the development of educational institutions, etc.). Now that most private production companies have shifted their focus to the more lucrative TV market, today the NFO is the only institution in a position to finance filmmaking. It now produces around three features and roughly 10 shorts annually.

The NFO's utilitarian conception of cinema didn't always produce the expected results. In the early Seventies, documentary filmmaker Omar Amiralay was already subverting the official line by calling attention to those left behind by Syria's development policies. His Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (72) portrayed the anger and poor living conditions of the peasant inhabitants on the banks of the Euphrates who have been adversely affected by agrarian reform. The film was promptly banned, and it was six years before Amiralay was permitted to work in Syria again. When he was given another chance, he made the equally subversive The Chickens (78), taking another step toward a contentious auteur cinema. The Chickens records the economic restructuring of Sadad, a "pilot village" located in the Syrian steppe, whose inhabitants take up state-subsidized chicken farming. Amiralay carefully presents the alienating relationship of the chicken farmer to his work and the inhuman character of intensive economic production. Using elaborate montage and a wide-angle lens, he draws a parallel between the chickens and the farmers, filming them in anamorphically distorted close-ups. At the end of the film they find themselves on the verge of bankruptcy after a fall in the price of eggs set by the government, and in the film's final sequence, their words are completely replaced by clucking. The distorted images of the farmers and their assimilation by the chickens in a zoomorphic mise-en-scène suggests Amiralay's antipathy toward his subjects, who have abandoned agriculture and artisanal work for what is basically a get-rich-quick scheme. At the same time, he denounces the exploitation of these farmers by a state system that at the time still claimed to be socialist.

The fiction films produced by the NFO benefited from a greater autonomy in terms of subject and cinematic expression. Until the late Seventies, they concentrated on the Palestinian question, and a number of them gained international recognition and won festival prizes, notably Men Under the Sun (70), co-directed by Mohammad Chahine, Marwan Mouazzen, and Nabil el-Maleh, and Khaled Hamada's The Knife (71), both adapted from novels by the celebrated Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. During this period, the NFO was regarded as the home of politically committed Arab cinema's vanguard, and it played host to a number of renowned directors, resulting in some of Arab cinema's key films of the period, including Egyptian filmmaker Tawfeeq Saleh's The Duped (72), Iraqi director Qais al-Zubaidi's Ali Yazerli (74), and Kufur Qassem (74), by Lebanon's Burhan Alwaiya.

If narrative filmmaking in the seventies often conveyed a commitment to the Palestinian cause and a Marxist conception of society, in the Eighties, the tone changed completely. The emphasis on collective causes gave way to more personal treatments of the relation between the individual and Syrian society, heralding the advent of an auteur cinema that drew upon the filmmakers' own experiences. Whereas the majority of films from the preceding period derived their scenarios from Arab literature, directors now began to write their own screenplays. This "New Wave," as Syrian critics referred to it, was heavily influenced by the realist approach taught at the Moscow film institute, VGIK, where many Arab filmmakers studied. The films that inaugurated this new phase were Nabil el-Maleh's Vestiges of Pictures (79), Samir Zikra's The Half-Meter Incident (80), and Mohammad Malas's Dreams of the City (83).

Dreams of the City recounts the experiences of an 11-year-old boy in Damascus during the Fifties. Newly arrived from the small town of Quneytra (the director's hometown in the Golan Heights region) with his mother and his brothers following the death of his father, the film's young protagonist excitedly discovers the capital during a period of political upheaval in which a number of coups d'états took place. Gradually the boy's enthusiasm and innocence turn to disenchantment as he discovers the violence that reigns in the social and political realm. Malas intends this depiction of an era of ferment, punctuated by exultant, promise-laden Pan-Arab speeches, to contrast with the sense of stagnation and collective disillusion that prevailed in the early Eighties, the time of the film's making.

This new cinematic current coincided with the increased hardening of the Syrian regime's authoritarian character following its repression of secular and religious oppositional movements, which had grown in strength and in some cases become radicalized in the late Seventies and early Eighties. As a result the NFO became a privileged space for the articulation of a dissenting discourse that could no longer express itself openly. Auteur films conveyed the difficulty individuals faced in asserting their identities at the margins of institutionalized power, whether it be familial, religious, or political in form. And in this way, they called into question premises, modes of identification, and representations fixed by the perceptual habits and imposed norms of Syrian society.

Without a doubt the most fully achieved example of this effort to describe individuals' inability to take control of their social and emotional destiny is Nabil el-Maleh's The Extras (93). Salem, a sensitive man from a modest background and a bit-part amateur theater actor, falls in love with Nada. After months of furtive meetings in public places, they rent an apartment for the afternoon from a friend. The apartment is the one place where they can be free from social convention and express their individuality and desires-but this metaphoric realm is permanently threatened by external intrusions: street sounds, knocks at the door, and the almost constant threat of discovery. At the same time it begins to literally shrink over the course of the film through the very precise spatial manipulations of el-Maleh's mise-en-scène. Nevertheless the couple manages to escape these pressures for a time. Salem legitimates their intimacy, unacceptable to Syrian social and religious convention, by improvising a marriage ceremony, fashioning wedding rings from iron wire. He then decides to put on a play for Nada and uses curtains to cobble together a set. Salem is no longer a bit-part actor; he's become a director shaping the course of events. While the couple are giving themselves over entirely to their dreams and desires, the secret police, who have come to arrest an old, blind oud player who lives next door, burst in. One of them discovers Nada hidden in the kitchen, exposing her dishonor in being found alone with a man. Trying to protect the old musician, Salem is beaten and humiliated while Nada looks on through the crack in the kitchen door. As Salem staggers, el-Maleh moves the camera erratically, causing the image to waver: the private space the couple believed they had created falls apart, proving to be illusory. Overcome with shame, Nada leaves the apartment without so much as a glance at Salem.

The auteur cinema has in turn produced an offshoot that could be termed cinema in vivo, made up of films anchored in the daily life of their directors' respective religious communities. Thus, the majority of the films of Abdullatif Abdul-Hamid and Oussama Mohammad take place within the Alawite community, those of Riyad Shayyah and Ghassan Shemeit within the Druze community, and those of Raymond Boutros within the Christian community. The critical import of this development is all the more striking in a country where the authorities have always tried to sublimate Syria's numerous religious and ethnic differences into a nationalist discourse.

Oussama Mohammad's Stars in Broad Daylight (88) inaugurated this new current. Mohammad presents a family living in a small village in the Alawite Mountains, a family dominated by its tyrannical eldest son, Khalil, who arranges the marriages of his younger brother Kasir and his sister Sana so as to increase the family's land holdings and strengthen his position in the community. In the course of the wedding feast, Kasir's fiancée runs away with another man, and, wounded by her brother's humiliation, Sana refuses to marry her fiancé as well. Khalil forces her to marry another older cousin, who rapes her before the wedding. The film's central character, Khalil, is a concrete embodiment of power: he decides his siblings' fate, while the paterfamilias who legitimizes his authority is a sweet, enfeebled old man. With his dark glasses, worn at all times, and his job at a wiretapping center in the city, he is depicted as a caricature of an intelligence-service agent (Syria's secret police recruits mainly from the Alawite community, the largest religious minority in Syria, to which the presidents Hafez and Bashar al-Assad belong). When Kasir arrives in Damascus for the first time to escape his brother's yoke, shots illustrating his first contact with the capital are punctuated by street posters of the famous singer who performed at his unhappy marriage ceremony. Mohammad is unmistakably mocking the ubiquity of presidential portraits throughout the city, the seat of political power, and by consistently playing on this register of humor and absurdity, Stars in Broad Daylight formulates an indirect critique of arbitrary power.

Mohammad's second feature, Sacrifices (02), also unfolds in a remote mountain village in the heart of the Alawite community. It opens with the dying agony of a patriarch who expires before passing his name down to his descendants. The story centers on the competition between family members to claim this name, which confers upon its holder power and authority over the clan. The memorable opening sequence juxtaposes the dying father with his two daughters-in-law, who are in the middle of giving birth, while the villagers cry and chant en masse. Here the spectator is positioned as a voyeur and plunged into a state of turmoil and anguish that is accentuated by the recurring use of low light. Mohammad fragments the bodies of his characters into close-ups of eyes, hands, faces, and feet, and frequently plays upon the reversed images of characters reflected in mirrors. But while it's highly polished in formal terms, Sacrifices is marked by religious and political symbolism that is inaccessible even to general Syrian audiences.

In this latter regard, Sacrifices indicates a particular shift in Syrian cinema toward a complex, metaphorical language-a recurrent recourse to metaphor, the fantastic, the absurd, the comic, and the use of settings in the distant past. This phenomenon can be explained by the strengthening of censorship since the mid-Nineties. The density of symbols and messages is all the greater since some directors are forced to wait many years before being able to make a film-intellectual censorship is supplemented by the material censorship of budgetary constraints and waiting lists. Nevertheless, Syrian filmmakers have been able to win a certain degree of creative autonomy, partly by calling on networks of friends within the NFO administration and the Ministry of Culture, but also by bypassing censorship, as much at the level of distribution as cinematic expression. Some filmmakers have been able to send their films to international festivals before being censored. Inside Syria, banned films circulate through informal networks within intellectual circles. In special cases they are also presented at the Damascus International Film Festival. This selective distribution effectively traps the filmmakers in a system in which cinematic free expression is tolerated but restricted and marginalized, and which they are forced to deal with by the political realities of the day. As well as being accomplished works of art, the rich and critical films that result nevertheless bear witness to their time and to the society that produced them.

Cécile Boëx is currently preparing a Ph.D. dissertation on the representation of politics in Syrian cinema at the French Institute in the Near East in Damascus.

© 2006 by Cécile Boëx